December 2014

-Mmmmm
Just keeping the streets clean.
-Free from evil.
Yep.
-You ever think about the universe, Mr. Trout? What if our world is just like a tiny speck?
A tiny little speck.
-And there are giants looking down on us?
And every time we move…
-It’s actually them moving us.
Seems a bit tedious.
-Like that, just there, me blinking. That would’ve taken them a day.
Me moving my arm, 500 men!
-I mean, none of them are going home. They’re having to do this bit. And now this bit. And this bit. I mean, this should stop.
I think it throws up notions of free will.
-It’s too much. And then they would’ve had to have done me talking about the blink, and it never ends. I think they make a meal of it, to be honest. I don’t know how they get the time. They’ve got to have other jobs. It’s more like a hobby. You know, like stamp collecting, something you do in your free time.

“No human being is free from fears. Fear is a part of our human process. To understand fear through Human Design, to understand the gates of fear in your chart will give you incredible insight into your life. It will give you a deep relief that there is nothing wrong with you. Fear is to be recognized and understood.

By entering into things correctly through living out the strategy of your type, fears can cease to be something that are perceived as problematic or debilitating. They can then be seen for what they are, mechanics of the human way and a by product of awareness and its potentials.”- Ra Uru Hu

On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there… on a mote of dust suspended… in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast, cosmic arena.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction… of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet… is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Carl Sagan – The Pale Blue Dot – Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey

from DAMPDESIGN
There are numerous time lapse videos of Iceland and Norway showing the beauty of their remote landscapes. But when you’re in the mountains, looking down, you see so many things happening. Especially in places like Geiranger (Norway) where ferries are sailing back and forth through the fjords, kayak cruises arriving and departing and cars crawling up and down the steep roads. I wanted to portray this like you are watching an ants hill, which gives such a funny perspective on things.

Centers on Nessa Stein, a woman who inherits her father’s arms business and finds herself in a international maelstrom when as she continues to promote the reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Who do you trust? How do you know? By how they appear. Or what they say? What they do? How? We all have secrets. We all tell lies, just to keep them from each other. And from ourselves. But sometimes. Rarely. Something can happen that leaves you no choice. But to reveal it. To let the world see who you really are. Your secret self. But mostly, we tell lies. We hide our secrets from each other, from ourselves. And the easiest way to do this is not to even know that you are. So when you think about it like that. It’s a wonder we trust anyone at all.”

The way of the Buddha is known as via negativa -the path of negation. This attitude, this approach has to be understood.

Buddha’s approach is unique. All other religions of the world are positive religions, they have a positive goal -call it God, liberation, salvation, self-realization- but there is a goal to be achieved. And positive effort is needed on the part of the seeker. Unless you make hard effort you will not reach the goal.

Buddha’s approach is totally different, diametrically opposite. He says you are already that which you want to become, the goal is within you; it is your own nature. You are not to achieve it. It is not in the future, it is not somewhere else. It is you right now, this very moment. But there are a few obstacles and those obstacles have to be removed.

It is not that you have to attain godhood, godhood is your nature-but there are a few obstacles to be removed. Once those obstacles are removed, you are that which you have always been seeking. Even when you were not aware of who you are, you were that. You cannot be otherwise. Obstacles have to be eliminated, dropped. Nothing else has to be added to you.

The positive religion tries to add something to you: virtue, righteousness, meditation, prayer. The positive religion says you are lacking something; you have to be in search of that which you are lacking. You have to accumulate something.

Buddha’s negative approach says you are not lacking anything. In fact, you are possessing too many things which are not needed. You have to drop something.

It is like this: You go trekking into the Himalayas. The higher you start reaching, the more you will feel the weight of the things you are carrying with you. Your luggage will become more and more heavy. The higher the altitude, the heavier your luggage will become. You will have to drop things. If you want to reach to the highest peak, you will have to drop all.

Once you have dropped all, once you don’t possess anything, once you have become a zero, a nothingness, a nobody, you have reached the peak. Something has to be eliminated, not added to you. Something has to be dropped, not accumulated.

When Buddha attained, somebody asked him, “What have you attained?” He laughed. He said, “I have not attained anything, because whatsoever I have attained was always with me. On the contrary, I have lost many things. I have lost my ego. I have lost my thoughts, my mind. I have lost all that I used to feel I possessed. I have lost my body-I used to think I was the body. I have lost all that.
Now I exist as pure nothingness. This is my achievement.” – Osho, Buddha; his life and teachings and impact on humanity

An ordinary Lego construction worker, thought to be the prophesied ‘Special’, is recruited to join a quest to stop an evil tyrant from gluing the Lego universe into eternal stasis. The LEGO Movie is a 3D animated film which follows lead character, Emmet a completely ordinary LEGO mini-figure who is identified as the most “extraordinary person” and the key to saving the Lego universe. Emmet and his friends go on an epic journey to stop the evil tyrant, Lord Business.

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